Thanks for that Kyle, I stand corrected. Just one point I'd like to make
though, if these Compaqs refuse to keep the proper drive parameters, have
you checked the CMOS batteries (longshot that 10 would be bad)?

If the batteries are good and Compaq doesn't have a BIOS update to correct
this situation, it would seem to me that these computers are prime
candidates for being repacked and shipped directly back to Compaq.

-----Original Message-----
The second consideration is the system you have it in.  Typically, the
Bigfoots came in Compaq Deathpro 2000 machines.  Due to Compaq's little
break from industry standard with respect to how it handls system BIOS, the
systems are not terribly intuitive when it comes to hard drive detection.
What will happen on occasion is the BIOS will detect the number of sectors
on the drive to be a few less than what is actually there.  This being the
case, there will be several allocation unit recovery attempts when
formatting because the BIOS does thinks it's formatted the whole drive, when
in fact it hasn't.  I know this because I went through it on about ten
separate occasions.  After creating diagnostic floppies and making changes
to the BIOS (a very slow process with floppies) to reflect the exact
perameters of the drive, the problem went away and the drive formatted
properly.

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